9 Photos of Grisly Vintage Crime Scenes on Today’s NYC Streets

For the first time in 12 years New Yorkers are electing a mayor who is not Michael Bloomberg, leading to all sorts of reminiscing about how he’s changed the city. These photos offer a twist: grisly historical crimes, juxtaposed against Bloomberg’s sanitized modern-day New York City.

What’s perhaps most striking about these images is how much New York hasn’t changed. For the most part many of the buildings are still intact, and it’s delightful to see the subtle evolution of details like streetsigns. Plus there’s something about seeing the black-and-white crime scenes in contemporary settings, which desensitizes the violence somewhat by removing it from its context.

Documenting crime is a critical part of a city’s history, but Hermann hears plenty of reactions from readers who object to seeing these scenes so graphically portrayed. “People seem to have righteous indignation in the comments section of news stories when we show tragic scenes as they occur today,” he says. He produced these images, in part, to illustrate the timelessness of human suffering. “I often remind people that a victim in 1943 is the same as a victim in 2013, and today’s photographers are making an important record of history that will, with the passage of time, be regarded as ‘classic.'” [New York Daily News via Fast Co.Exist]